Latest news with #ScottJohnston
BBC News
11 hours ago
- BBC News
Men deny attempting to smuggle cocaine into Cornwall
Two men who deny smuggling more than 200kg of cocaine into the UK have gone on trial. Five other men previously pleaded guilty to conspiring to smuggle the drugs, worth more than £6m, into Cornwall, Truro Crown Court was jury heard the drugs were secreted aboard a cargo ship sailing from South America and then offloaded into the English Johnston, 37, of Havant, Hampshire and Michael May, 47, of Kelveden Hatch, Essex, deny a charge of conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the UK. 'Bales of drugs' Prosecutor Frederick Hookway told the jury a Border Force boat spotted a fast moving rigid inflatable boat (RIB) in the sea off Cornwall one morning in September last court heard the RIB sped off towards land and dumped drug bales into the sea after Border Force gave Hookway said the black watertight bales of drugs were fitted with a GPS tracking device attached to Apple air tags so they could be located by a second smaller boat to be taken to the Cornish court heard how Mr Johnston was one of three men on board the RIB and was found to have £2,615 in cash on other two other men on the vessel, Peter Williams, 43, of Havant, and Edwin Tabora Baca, 32, of Barcelona, Spain, have admitted a charge of drug landed the RIB at Gwynver beach near Sennen, where they attempted to run off in different directions before being arrested, the jury Hookway told the court the second defendant, Mr May, was arrested in a van on the Cornish coast, and alleged he was going to transport the unloaded drugs. 'Value of £6.2m' The court heard how a satellite phone was found in the target RIB showing where it had sailed, revealing it had left Mountbatten in Plymouth, Devon, the night before it was site analysis and number plate recognition inquiries showed the interaction between some of the men involved in the drug smuggling plot, the court Hookway said six bundles thrown into the sea were recovered and contained 230 blocks of high purity cocaine, weighing 1kg each, and with a wholesale value of £6.2m."It is suspected not all the discarded drugs were recovered," Mr Hookway two defendants deny the charge that they conspired with Peter Williams, Edwin Tabora Baca, Billy Pearce, Terry Willis, Alexander Fowley and others unknown to smuggle cocaine into the trial continues.
Business Wire
07-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Fastino Launches TLMs (Task-Specific Language Models) with $17.5M Seed Round Led by Khosla Ventures
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fastino AI today unveiled a groundbreaking new AI model architecture, coined 'TLMs' – Task-Specific Language Models. Developed by in-house AI researchers from Google DeepMind, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Apple Intelligence, TLMs deliver 99X faster inference than traditional LLMs and were trained on less than $100K in low-end gaming GPUs. Fastino is also announcing $17.5M in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, the first investor in OpenAI – bringing Fastino's total funding to $25M. The round included participation from preseed lead investor Insight Partners as well as Valor Equity Partners, and notable angels including Scott Johnston, the previous CEO of Docker, and Lukas Biewald, the CEO of Weights & Biases. As of today, developers can access the TLM API, which includes a free tier with up to 10,000 requests per month. The API is purpose-built for specific tasks, with the first models including: Summarization: Generate concise, accurate summaries from long-form or noisy text, enabling faster understanding and content distillation. Function Calling: A hyper-efficient model designed for agentic systems, enabling precise, low-latency tool invocation – ideal for integrating LLMs into production workflows. Text to JSON: Convert unstructured text into structured, clean, and production-ready JSON for seamless downstream integration. PII Redaction: Redact sensitive or personally identifiable information on a zero-shot basis, including support for user-defined or industry-specific entity types. Text Classification: A versatile zero-shot model for any labeling task, equipped with enterprise-grade safeguards including spam and toxicity detection, out-of-bounds filtering, jailbreak detection, and intent classification. Profanity Censoring: Identify and redact profane language to ensure content compliance and brand safety. Information Extraction: Extract structured data – such as entities, attributes, and contextual insights – from unstructured text to support use cases like document processing, search query parsing, question answering, and custom data detection. 'We started this company after our last startup went viral and our infrastructure costs went through the roof. At one point, we were spending more on language models than on our entire team. That made it clear: general-purpose LLMs are overkill for most tasks. So we set out to build models that worked for devs,' said Ash Lewis, CEO and co-founder of Fastino. 'Our models are faster, more accurate, and cost a fraction to train while outperforming flagship models on specific tasks.' Trained on NVIDIA gaming GPUs for less than $100,000, Fastino's TLMs can inference on low-end hardware such as CPUs or gaming GPUs. Although significantly smaller than current industry models with trillions of parameters, Fastino's models deliver market-leading accuracy and inference 99.67X faster than existing LLMs. The specialized architecture achieves better accuracy as tasks become more well-defined. 'Large enterprises using frontier models typically only care about performance on a narrow set of tasks,' said Jon Chu, Partner at Khosla Ventures. 'Fastino's tech allows enterprises to create a model with better-than-frontier model performance for just the set of tasks you care about and package it into a small, lightweight model that's portable enough to run on CPUs, all while being orders of magnitude faster with latency guarantees. These tradeoffs open up new use cases for generative models that historically haven't been practical before.' Fastino is breaking from industry standards with a flat monthly subscription that eliminates per-token fees, allowing developers to access the complete TLM suite with predictable usage costs. For enterprise customers, Fastino TLMs can be deployed within a customer's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), on-premise data center, or at the edge, allowing enterprises to maintain control over sensitive information while leveraging advanced AI capabilities. 'AI developers don't need an LLM trained on trillions of irrelevant data points – they need the right model for their task,' said George Hurn-Maloney, COO and co-founder of Fastino. 'That's why we're making highly accurate, lightweight models with the first-ever flat monthly pricing – and a free tier so devs can integrate the right model into their workflow without compromise.' For more information about Fastino and its specialized models, visit About Fastino Fastino is a developer-first AI company based in Palo Alto, California, building TLMs (Task-Specific Language Models) designed for accuracy, speed, and cost-predictability. Founded by experts from Google DeepMind and Apple, Fastino's purpose-built models outperform general-purpose LLMs on real-world enterprise tasks – while running at a fraction of the compute cost.
Daily Mirror
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Emmerdale newcomer Bradley Riches makes sweet gesture to co-stars ahead of wedding
Emmerdale star, Bradley Riches, says he's already invited his pals from Netflix teen series, Heartstopper, and Celebrity Big Brother to his marriage to Scott Johnston next April Emmerdale newcomer Bradley Riches says things are going so well on the soap that he'll need to expand the guest-list at his wedding next year. The Heartstopper star, 23, says he's already invited his pals from the hit Netflix teen series and Celebrity Big Brother to his marriage to Scott Johnston next April, at an English manor house. 'I'll probably end up inviting the whole Emmerdale cast," he laughed. "I'll have been filming for over a year by then So, yes, we'll definitely need to expand the guest list.' He says that landing a role in the long-running ITV soap would have been particularly special for one family member. 'It was my grandad Peter's favourite soap. I've always had a special connection with Emmerdale. Maybe it was his parting gift. He'd have been buzzing.' Bradley, best known for his role as Heartstopper's James McEwan, says he is ignoring those who have trolled him over the new role. Speaking about the negative comments he's had on social media about joining Emmerdale, he says: 'In this industry, you've always got to expect that, which is sad to say. Me being my true and authentic self, some people aren't going to like that. I knew it was going to happen – a happy, gay, autistic person being delighted about getting a new job. Of course, someone will find the negative within that. But it was drowned out by loads of positivity. I'm having a bloody amazing time. Nobody's going to dampen this experience for me.' In the soap he will make his first appearance as Lewis Barton next week, making him the brother of Ross Barton, played by Michael Michael Parr. 'My mum was Emma Barton who was killed some years ago by Moira Dingle, who is like a second mum to Ross. I reach out to him to say I'd love to meet him and know more about my mum but when we meet, we don't see eye to eye. I'm very to-the-point and have a thousand questions I want answered, which scares Ross. So they really don't create that brotherly bond and I leave. Obviously, I return! For Lewis, expect the unexpected – he's got a few secrets up his sleeve.' Bradley says Michael has helped him to settle in on set. 'I've got a special bond with Mike - my first five weeks were just us two together. We're like brothers – he's very protective of me. He says, 'You're under my wing now!' which is so sweet. When my role was announced, some people were a bit negative and he was like, 'Nah, this is not happening.' And while he's enjoying his time on the soap immensely, he's already got his eye on other projects. "I'm learning so much on Emmerdale and it's so fast-paced, I'm happy to be doing this. I'd love to do Strictly one day though.'
